PROCESO DE TEÑIDO CON COLORANTES REACTIVOS

When we talk about digital memory now, we talk about zip drives and cloud storage. These are important but impermanent memories, subject to decay, loss, and physical destruction. Aligned with the metabolic project, I propose we might instead think of digital memory as the permanent marks left on the earth by our digital networked system. Through bioaccumulation, our soils, bodies, and biosphere are registering permanent traces of the digital’s ecological rucksack. Through waste

accumulations, our digital activity is becoming fossilized as future memories of our past and present action.155

“We are embedded in our trash,” John Knechtel writes in his book called Trash, “there is no easy way to leap beyond it and build a utopia without garbage…its

production is rooted in survival, represented in every culture, and magnified by economic success.”156

If Cisco is correct that by 2020 we’ll have 50 billion connected things, we’ll also then have 50 billion things that will, if the life rates of those things remain as paltry as they are today, be very quickly 50 billion things for the waste heap—to be replaced by 50 billion more things ad nauseam until resources expire. As far as our technology

consumption is concerned, we are effectively living in Italo Calvino’s Leonia.157

The “opulent” city of Leonia renews itself each morning—it “refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-

unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing…”—only to find that its renewal is indeed its destruction. 158 _{The street cleaners arrive each morning to remove the previous}

155 _{Davis and Turpin write, “while the manufacture of plastics [and we can say other components as well]}

destroys the archives of life on earth, its waste will constitute the archives of the twentieth century and beyond.” 347.

156 _{Knectel, 9.}

157 _{Story and quotes from Calvino, Invisible Cities, 114-116.} 158 _Ibid.

day’s waste and “nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse.” 159

The trash meanwhile, is creating mountainous piles outside the city and, following Leonia’s desire for newness, as new, more decay-resistant materials are created, the piles become ever larger with ever longer lifespans. “A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.” 160 _{The result,}

Calvino’s narrator Marco Polo tells us is that “the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be

removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday’s sweepings piles up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and all of its days and years and decades. Leonia’s rubbish little by little would invade the world…”161

If the moment we buy an electronic device is the same moment it becomes obsolete, we are living in an endless cycle of consumption. We are purchasing electronic waste that we’ll use for an embarrassingly short amount of time before dumping it and moving on to the next. “Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and e-readers all at one time held the promise of a more environmentally healthy world not dependent on paper and deforestation. The result of our ubiquitous digital lives is… quite the opposite: not

159 _Ibid. 160 _Ibid. 161 _Ibid.

ecological health but an environmental wasteland, where media never die.”162 _We’ve

developed a strange sort of ‘green’ awareness whereby we sign our emails “think before you print” but we’ve not yet cultivated the same sort of stewardship of our devices.

A recent United Nations University (UNU) report claims the amount of global e- waste reached 41.8 million tons in 2014.163 _{That’s the equivalent of about 22 million}

standard-sized sedans. Most, if not all of that, is wasted. The United Nations

Environment Program (UNEP) reports “between 60-90 percent of electronic waste is ending up in mountains of rubbish throughout the developing world, or is traded through criminal e-waste smuggling networks worth billions of dollars.”164

In the US, Americans currently average a per-person e-waste dumping of more than 65 pounds per year. Waste devices and their wasted resources are, as one might guess, expected to rapidly rise hitting a predicted 65.4 million tons of e-waste in 2018.165

Not all of this is digital waste—this includes non-digitized household appliances—but the digital proportion is growing, and our appliances are growing more digital. The UNU report estimates that our wasted devices contained

162 _{Parikka, 2015b, back cover.}

163 _{From The Global E-Waste Monitor 2014: http://unu.edu/news/news/ewaste-2014-unu-report.html.} 164 _{They continue: “Because e-waste is considered a ‘hazardous substances,’ the UN says this trade is in}

violation of the Basel Convention.” See more here: http://www.chinafile.com/reporting- opinion/environment/chinas-role-illegal-trade-toxic-e-waste-rising-sharply.

165 _{The authors of this report prefer building comparisons saying that 65.4 million tons is the equivalent of}

200 Empire State Buildings or 11 Great Pyramids of Giza. http://www.step-

initiative.org/tl_files/step/_documents/MIT-NCER%20US%20Used%20Electronics%20Flows%20Report%20- %20December%202013.pdf.

16,500 kilotons of iron, 1,900 kilotons of copper, and 300 ton of gold as well as significant amounts of silver, aluminum, palladium, and other potentially reusable resources…This e-waste represented some US$52 billion of potentially reusable resources, yet little of it was collected for recovery, or even

treated/disposed of in an environmentally sound manner. Less than one-sixth is thought to have been properly recycled or made available for reuse.166

It goes without saying that all parts of the digital network are subject to becoming waste, from laptops, smart meters, and device packaging to wires,

environmental sensors, and undersea cables.167 _{Parikka calls this zombie media: “media}

do not die,” he says “media persist as electronic waste, toxic residue, and its own sort of fossil layer of disused gadgets and electronics.”168 _{They become memorialized in our}

bodies, soils, and earth and are finding new digital afterlives as toxic waste, oceanic debris, and even new geological formations:

The social itself is part of a new geology, as the beaches have been remade into plastiglomerate, their sands mingled with the pulverized microplastics of our petroleum age…Geologists have now begun to study “technofossils” and the sedimented debris layers…that now constitute part of the geological and planetary record.169

166 _Ibid.

167 _{“When cables cease to be commercially viable, they remain in the ocean and create various ripple effects}

through organizations invested in marine space. After cables are disconnected and decommissioned, they often disappear from view. Early cables were left on the seafloor after they broke or became obsolete, their locations often removed from cable maps and nautical charts. Today cables can also be deinstalled and retrieved or rerouted; this is done more often to keep the cables from conflicting with potential alternative uses of the seafloor than to avoid any document environmental impact. In fact, pulling the cable up from the ocean can disrupt the seabed and aquatic creatures that have fastened themselves to the cable, especially if it has been there for decades. Although companies are not always required to pull up undersea cables, they are not allowed to abandon ownership or responsibility.” Starosielski, 221-222.

168 _{Parikka, 2015, 144.} 169 _{Thill, 3-4.}

Electronic waste, from toxic materials to plastic casing, is being written into oceanic history—according to Ellen MacArthur, there will be more plastic waste, some of that coming from e-waste, than fish in the ocean by 2050170_{—and it is interacting with}

the earth to create new rock types called plastiglomerate.

Plastiglomerate, found so the coasts of Hawaii, is a new, and some say markedly Anthropocenic, stone that organically combines natural soils with plastic debris. This new rock, demonstrates the digital’s metabolic memory in a rather profound, somewhat uncanny, way.

Figure 6: Kelly Jazvac, Plastiglomerate, 2013. Image courtesy the artist.

Tossed ‘away’ and forgotten by their owners, our devices and their plastic casings become actively geologic. They also become quite toxic.

Whether trashed or dutifully recycled in well-managed centers, in their de- manufacture and destruction, the devices become toxic. Though properly packaged within our devices so as to not cause direct harm to the user, when the devices are broken down, burned, or buried at the end of their perceived or performative lifetime, the toxic components we encountered in the mining and manufacturing stages become actively harmful again. When improperly broken down, toxins, pollutants, and

carcinogens directly re-enter the biophysical and environmental metabolic streams. E-waste is another of our ‘global village’ connectors and another area for concern when it comes to digital labor practices, child endangerment, human health, and

environmental justice. Though not given proper treatment here, there are many recent studies, see for instance Grossman, the documentary Exporting Harm, the UN’s Global E- Waste Monitor and Greenpeace’s many e-waste reports, that illustrate these global health and labor problems associated with these e-waste heaps. They discuss too how climate change disproportionately affects the marginalized laborers and communities that our motifs already work to hide.

Digital media theory’s omission of e-waste is perhaps the most indicting of the mystique-building techniques of our ‘magical’ ‘invisible’ digital motifs. In sharp contrast

to its promised invisibility, the moment a device becomes waste, it becomes a concretely environmental and distinctly digital issue. Despite the marketing rhetoric and our disconnected relationship to trash, e-waste is a serious global digital-cultural problem. Digital de-construction is nauseating business, literally and figuratively.

Media theorists should be studying, sharing, and creating these stories of e-waste if they are to claim a comprehensive media study. Digital disposal can be seen, Parikka says,

as an ever more central technique concerning our media culture, and it reveals a much more complex relation to materials, nature, and the economy than just pure discarding. Its momentary disappearance from sight just extends to a longer geopolitical and geographical network of waste management. This is an

extension of our normal media studies concerns.171

There is much to be gained by taking our media study from beginning (mineral) to end (e-waste). We need to take seriously the idea that the digital network, and all of its parts, is, despite our biasing motifs, one of the most physical aspects of contemporary media study. When we do, we see that the health and future of environmental systems (and the humans that rely on them) require that we shift the focus of digital media and digital cultural studies from user-centric computation and affectation to the full

metabolic intermingling of planetary digital ecologies. How will we produce a more ecologically and temporally sustainable foundation for media theory if we do not?